Jonathon Young and Crystal Pite’s Assembly Hall blends dance, drama and voiceover.Kidd Pivot
A hallmark of the collaborations between playwright Jonathon Young and choreographer Crystal Pite – two of Canada’s most internationally acclaimed theatre artists working today – is a unique blending of dance, drama and voiceover modulations. And based on early reviews out of Vancouver, that signature hybrid is once again at play in Assembly Hall, their highly anticipated new creation.
In 2015′s Betroffenheit, the duo explored the depths of grief with demon-like characters standing in for loss, addiction and remorse. In Revisor, their 2019 riff on a Nikolai Gogol play, a ragtag of citizens and bureaucrats are gradually slipping away from their roles as the dance disintegrates spoken communication. The setting this time is a community hall, where a weary group of medieval re-enactors meet for the one last annual general meeting before dissolution. What compels them to repeat the Quest Fest year after year, and what keeps pulling them apart in real life? And will Robert’s Rules of Order, and language as communication tool, be enough to keep the chaos at bay?
“We’re fascinated by the deep human need for belonging and togetherness, the difficulty in maintaining that, and our deep need to continue to try,” Pite said in a video call from Montreal last week. “And even in that small meeting of like-minded people we find plenty of drama and division.”
The new piece is also a paean to the church basement, community gym, choir practice room – all the places where strangers gather in a communal activity. This form of sociability seems to be in decline, I suggest to the creators; we’ve become atomized, and the pandemic and the lockdowns made things worse.
Young and Pite in rehearsal for Assembly Hall.Kidd Pivot
“Yes, and here we are, having a conversation, and we’re totally alone,” Young says, also from Montreal, when we touch base in a separate video call. “We were interested in that question: why people come together, why is that essential to us? And as in our previous work, there is tension between how we as humans interact in language and how we interact on a level deeper than that, that is perhaps pure physicality.”
The nature of their art form is social, Pite says. “As theatre-makers, we come together to make things together. We are like-minded in the things that we care about and in our endeavours … and we are also in community and in conversation with our audiences. It’s something that we love deeply.”
In early discussions, Young and Pite investigated stories of heroic quests, particularly Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Story of the Grail. They were inspired by, “Perceval showing up at the court of the wounded Fisher King, whose wound is somehow connected to the desolation of the land, and this mysterious order of the Grail Castle that has congregated around the wound,” Young says. “The knight who arrives fails to ask the essential question that would heal the wound and make everything whole. We adapted that story and put these medieval re-enactors in a community hall as a contemporary version of that story, without the mythic splendor. Here is a group of people who are still gathered around this wound, still seem bound by it. That tension between the mythic and the ordinary is where the show sits.”
As was the case in their previous collaborations, characters of Assembly Hall speak in prerecorded voiceover, every sentence given its own choreography. A Young-Pite collaboration is a multistep process, starting with the initial brainstorm and draft of a synopsis, followed by Young’s solo writing period. Next is a period of workshopping, before the pair meets with the voice actors to record rough drafts of each scene.
After the script is finalized and recorded, the dancers come in and the work on choreography begins. “The play has to have gaps in the narrative that are filled with physicality,” Young says. “The dance has to be essential.”
The show is tweaked continuously, even after it premieres, but the prerecorded text remains unchanged.
Why not just mike the dancers, who could then speak live during the show?
“Something interesting happens when language becomes an external force, detached from the body,” Young says. “There’s a tension between body and language that opens up dramatic territories. As creatures of language we seem utterly identified by words. Language is our connection to the world, and to our sense of self, and yet there’s something else underneath the language that feels more like me. But here I am, trying to explain this to you, and feeling like I’m getting tangled up and not saying what I’m trying to say. That’s the territory that I think we’re in. This method also frees up our performers to go full out and perform the most acrobatic physicality and the language stays on track.”
“Having a prerecorded text in this show dealing with the idea of re-enactment – that also underlines our theme really nicely,” Pite adds.
Assembly Hall's Renée Sigouin.Michael Slobodian/Kidd Pivot
The show fell into place, she says, when the stage design landed: the mundane and the sublime of a community hall. “That space for us is so potent. Whether it was the school gym, or the community hall, all the places that I trained in as a dancer, my first shows, all the high school dances … it’s a place of many important thresholds in our lives. Memorials and weddings and graduations. It’s a place of rites. So when we landed on that space for the show, as much as it was banal and familiar it was also full of magic.”
Would she agree that in the age dominated by screens, all that is on its way out – the hobbyist societies, the in-person book clubs, the Christmas fairs, the street parties, that face-to-face communality? She pauses to think but doesn’t hesitate. “No. Maybe it will take a different form. We will be assembling like this for as long as humans are around. It’s built into our DNA, this want to be together, as difficult as it is. Humans are at their best when they’re in service to each other and to something that they love.”
Assembly Hall will be in Toronto at Canadian Stage, Dec. 6-9, and in Quebec at Le Diamant, Dec. 14-16, before embarking on a European tour in March 2024.
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